New York Film Festival 60 Screenings 3

Pacifiction (Albert Serra)

Hopefully, the fact that I preferred several films to Albert Serra's The Death of Louis XIV at the 2016 New York Film Festival will shore up my authority when I confess that Pacifiction marks the second Serra feature in a row that I've deemed the best film at the festival (Liberté stole my heart in 2019). What can I say? About three quarters through Pacifiction's 165 minutes, I experienced a rush of euphoria so overwhelming that I can no longer shake the conclusion that Serra is our greatest director of nominally narrative feature-length films.

A source of that euphoria stems from Serra's perversion of the concept of camera coverage, the practice of shooting enough footage to provide the editor with a large amount of options to cut a scene. Serra's practice differs in that the actors have little clue where the cameras are at and thus cannot play a scene in any precise way. And given that every scene is improvised, the actors are left as unmoored as the audience (no surprise to learn that Pacifiction occasioned the most walkouts at Cannes). Furthermore, Serra's coverage program leaves him with almost as little command as his actors and audience. He doesn't know what he will wind up with and, indeed, the 165-minute film before us was planed down from 540 hours of footage over months of editing. Pacifiction, then, is chaos shaped into an all-plot-no-story phantasmagoria. That it still retains an authorial drive and a palpable albeit bewildering sense of continuity is damn near miraculous, art cinema at its furthest extreme.

The question of whether Serra's m.o. counts as directing or even results in cinema is what drives both the love and hate for this film. For those who welcome the feeling of being unmoored from ontological categories and narrative strictures, Pacification is intoxication incarnate. For others, Serra's devotion to his methodology is a ticket to hell on earth. The best critique I've come across is a brief but spirited takedown on Letterboxd from Bingham Bryant, the co-director of my beloved For the Plasma.

A synopsis is near impossible to reconstruct, never my strong point (or chief concern) anyway, since each scene appears in its place as indifferently as a breeze. Benoît Magimel plays De Roller, "High Commissioner of the Republic in French Polynesia,” a position he occupies with great interpersonal savvy. He represents the French government in Tahiti and, for a time, manages to quell the Tahitians' fears of colonialist meddling. But De Roller's specific role morphs throughout. Much of the time, he gives great meeting. But he also seems to be some sort of cultural ambassador, directing a traditional Tahitian dance performance (and thus meddling anyway?). Other times, he seems to align with the sybaritic marines and government dignitaries enjoying the beautiful women and men who people a drowsy night club. His connection to a trans woman, Shannah (Pahoa Mahagafanau, electric), deepens as the film progresses. She moves from a seemingly tangential hotel employee to De Roller's closest confidant. The film grows steadily more agitated as the threat of nuclear testing on the island becomes of a reality. Plenty more characters and situations (including an absolutely gorgeous surfing sequence) could be mentioned but less as connective tissue than elements bouncing around an entropic environment. The overall effect is akin to falling through a trap door every few minutes. I found myself simultaneously energized by the undertaking and lulled by its many hazy longueurs. 

Grade: A+